Quote:
Originally Posted by janvanmaar
That time has already come, in Europe at least. Try to search for a few (DRM'ed) German, French, Dutch, Spanish,... books in mobi and then try it in epub. Unless your sample is very small or skewed in some way, you will find a clear epub win. Except of UK, Amazon is totally loosing the battle in Europe.
It is true that just switching to epub would not help dramatically: it is also about too little advertisement and too small focus. The reader has to be ordered from US, US warranty conditions apply etc. However, it is likely that Amazon will try to reconsider and focus more on Europe at some point - and at that point they might HAVE TO start supporting epub.
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But there is a problem no doubt to do with all sorts of stupid regulations or monopolies that stops one from buying all sorts of stuff across European boundaries. For example I wanted a DVD of a French film. It wasn't available on amazon.co.uk. There is no amazon.ch (they own the domain name but you get transferred to Germany). It wasn't available from amazon.de. In the end I ordered it from amazon.fr, but couldn't get it delivered to Switzerland, so I had to have it delivered to an address in France and eventually sent on to me. If the same sort of thing applies to ebooks, then the market will be very fragmented and in any case it is split by language.